Outcast

The next morning, the sun glittered brightly upon the frost on the front yard; gathering its strength before streaming spitefully through the blinds that Amanda had forgotten to close the night before.
The light fell on the bare room, illuminating the door to the hallway, the blank white walls and the tall bed where Amanda slept, peacefully unaware of the impending dawn.

She slept on until, towards noon, the sunbeams intensified; its new strength alighting mercilessly on Amanda’s face.
Rolling over with a groan, Amanda tried pulling the covers over her head; but soon the sounds of her family moving around roused her from her slumber.

Amanda rubbed the sleep from her eyes and yawned, scowling to herself as she heard footsteps outside the door.

“Amanda? Are you awake yet?” her mother called softly, opening the door a crack.

“No, I'm not. Go away.” Amanda rolled her eyes, wrapping herself in her blanket and sitting up in the bed.

“Good,” Her mother pushed the door open the rest of the way and entered, standing a pile of boxes by the door. “I thought for a second you were still asleep... Is this the room you want?”

Amanda nodded silently, glaring out at the unseasonal blue skies while her mother continued, oblivious.

“You can unpack these while you’re still in here, then we’ve got a few things to do around the house. When we’re all finished this afternoon I thought we might go into town and just have a look around. Do you want to come with us?”

Amanda just stared blankly at her mother until she got the message.

“Okay, okay. Maybe some other time.” Mrs. Pearson smiled weakly at her daughter, sighing as she backed out of the room and closed the door behind her.

“Argh!” Amanda growled and fell back into the bed, trying to work out why her mother refused to see that she wanted nothing to do with her preppy, boring, normal life.

She could never see that her daughter had much better things to do than go shopping or Tennis or whatever it was that most people did.
Even if those things only consisted of surfing the net, playing her guitar and listening to music - especially now that she was in a strange new town.

You see, even the first time she dyed her hair blue her mother had just sighed and tried to take her out shopping for girly hats the next day.
As you may have noticed already, understanding and sentiment were not things that Amanda and her mother shared.
Theirs was a relationship born of necessity, and Amanda had long ago decided not to go to pains to make her mother happy.
It was never going to happen, no matter what she did - she could either be herself, and disappoint her mother; or fake a smile every day and lie to herself. Amanda knew what she wanted, and what she could handle - living in a lie was not one of those things.

After a few minutes thinking about such depressing truths, she sighed and sat back up on her bed, looking towards the pile of boxes.
She debated, for a second, whether to bother unpacking them right then or not.

Eventually deciding to at least check out what was in them, she walked over to the closest box, reaching inside and pulling out what lay on top.
It was an old manila folder - a small part of the junk she had thrown into the boxes as she was packing.
The folder was full of sheet after sheet of paper; poetry, notes and letters... these letters never posted, never meant to be posted.

Most were useless - but near to the bottom of the pile, on a page dog-eared and crumpled with age, was a sheet that brought back some of her most painful memories.
The scrawled note was a letter to herself; a diary confession, a heartfelt plea for help from the time in her life when she felt the most pain.

Even a year ago she still would have felt the same burning ache as the day she wrote it, but this time she read it with only a tired sadness.
She scanned the shaky lines of handwriting, knowing now what she didn’t then - things didn’t change as you grew older.
They just got more complicated, and her fourteen-year-old self’s hopes for a peaceful world were simply impossible...

<i>Where to start...? I’m trying to explain this to myself as much as anything. I think, to begin with, I can explain the guilt I feel - I hear of people, kids whose lives are so terrible - they have reason to be lonely, reason to feel such pain. But I don’t. All I feel is an aching loneliness, which is all the more amplified when I am with my family. But my life is good - I should be happy, I shouldn’t want to be alone all the time. {...Ha, that’s funny, isn’t it? I feel lonely around people, so I escape to be alone.} I don’t feel much anymore, and mostly when I do it’s a sense of anger at myself, because I can’t fit in - I can’t be normal and just... happy. I don’t cry everyday - I get through life, and sometimes I laugh, I smile - but it never lasts. I think part of my pain is that I know the only people who understand, the only people who know how I feel, are those who have been through much worse situations than mine. And then there’s the people who tell us about their pain, through their music or art, - they understand me, and it hurts because I can never talk to them, or anyone like them. I have no one. I thought about suicide once, for the difference it would make - finally, something interesting happening... but I knew then, and now, I’ll never do it. I'm not strong enough mentally - I haven’t got the guts to take any step towards pain - besides, what right have I to escape the pain, when others who go through worse have to live and deal with it? Escape isn’t an option, and all I have left is emptiness in my soul. My life sucks for no reason, and what I need is a way to break out and leave it behind - will I ever be able to?</i>

As the last echoing words faded from her mind, Amanda found she was scrunching the sheet into a tiny ball, and angrily tossing it into the bin.
She was upset at herself for not being as over her past as she had thought, and not entirely sure why she had felt so suddenly furious at the world.

But it wouldn’t matter, after all, she just had to get out for a while.
Amanda stormed out of the house, pausing just long enough to grab her coat and call to her mother in passing that she would be out for awhile.

She walked on for a long time, not really caring where she was going, until she found herself walking out of a side street onto the parking lot of a mall.

“Great,” she muttered to herself, “I get out of one place where I hate to be, and end up at another.”

She was about to turn and leave to find a better place to go, when the sound of a distant, familiar song caught her attention.
She turned and listened, moving towards the sound as it grew slowly louder, until she found herself standing before the very front of a makeshift stage at the back of the complex.